Age of Mythology is known to have fog of war and water texture issues on computers with unsupported video cards, especially Intel integrated graphics chips. The reason for this issue is that Age of Mythology defaults to very poor graphical presets if it can’t identify your video card. Symptoms for this graphical glitch include:

Access to only a few low quality resolutions.

Pixelated water that isn’t transparent. The effect can be seen in the image below. Rather than seeing the sea bed the water is a completely opaque blue.

Fog of war that displays in large black squares. These squares don’t properly show your ‘true’ view range and look similar to the ones in the image below.

To fix this fog of war/water glitch follow the steps below:

Copy the contents of geforce3.gfx. Your geforce3.gfx file is located in:gfxconfig\geforce3.gfx
gfxconfig2\geforce3.gfx (titans only)
Open one of these files in a text editor and copy it’s entire contents. You should be able to open these files with any text editor (notepad++ for example).

Overwrite the contents of all i845.gfx files with those of geforce3.gfx. The i845.gfx file is located in:gfxconfig\i845.gfx
gfxconfig2\i845.gfx (titans only)
Open i845.gfx in a text editor and overwrite all of the content with the configurations you copied from geforce3.gfx. Make sure to overwrite both copies of the file if you have Titans. Don’t change any file names. If you don’t have Titans installed you won’t have a gfxconfig2 folder so don’t worry about it.

Disable anistropy. User Piet reported that the problem did not resolve for him until he disabled anisotropy in his modified i845.gfx file. To disable anisotropy change this line:anisotropy=1 // DWORD. hardcodes anisotropy on (or off), regardless of what driver saysto:anisotropy=0 // DWORD. hardcodes anisotropy on (or off), regardless of what driver says

What’s happening here is that Age of Mythology doesn’t recognize your video card so defaults to the worst possible supported configuration – i845. By overwriting the contents of the i845.gfx configuration with those for the geforce3 chipset you’re tricking Age of Mythology into using the highest possible settings by default instead.

If the above steps don’t work there is a chance that you may have one of the other supported graphics card but still with very few available configurations (AKA the game won’t default to your modified i845.gfx configuration). Just like how you overwrote the default i845 gfx configuration you can use the geforce3.gfx file to overwrite your video card’s configuration file in the gfxconfig and gfxconfig2 folders. If you don’t know which file to change, you’ll have to change all the .gfx files in these folders except the ones that start with 0x (i.e. 0x3d3d_3dlabs.gfx).

If you’ve followed the above steps and are still having issues with the Age of Mythology square fog of war and water glitch, please post in the comments below. To increase your chances of a solution being found include as much detail as possible (which version of the game you’re running, what operating system you have, what video card you have and steps to reproduce the issue). Screenshots are also very useful!

thanks a lot! it fixed the water and fog of war glitches!
i have a question though, when i drag a box with my cursor the box is black (and the cursor has some lag with the box) is it supposed to be outlined with black? i was watching a youtube video and his was white. Just wondering, thanks again!

I had the same problem once on an old integrated graphics laptop. The steps above would only fixed the water and not the fog of war. The problem only went away after I re-installed Windows 7 after getting a new hard disk, and then installed the games again and followed the steps again.

You must have incorrect game config stored somewhere. Try removing everything you can find for the game from your computer (uninstall, remove all folders left over, remove registry keys etc.) and then re-install and trying the steps again. Also make sure you have the latest possible video card drivers and have all relevant Windows updates installed.

Did everything listed here. Even rewrote all the gfx as indicated. Still have original issue with fog of war and water. Oddly, the water will sometimes “fix” itself after playing the game for a bit and look like it is supposed to, but the fog of war never corrects.

Fully updated game, running Windows 8.1, but had the problem in simple 8 as well. Intel HD graphics 4000, so not a powerhouse, but it runs all the other animations and higher graphics of the game perfectly fine.

I’ve never tried this fix on Windows 8 but the principle should be the same. With integrated graphics cards the problem is often that the game tries to pick a very low GFX configuration because it cannot recognize your card.

I wish it wasn’t such a brute force solution, but I haven’t yet found a way to see which GFX configuration specifically the game is using. The only thing I can suggest, which you have probably already done, is to make sure all GFX files (both in gfxconfig and gfxconfig2) are overwritten with the contents of your geforce3.gfx file. If you find a way to see which GFX file the game picks up, or if you have any other info on the topic please let me know.

I reinstalled and repeated the basic steps above (for i845 and anisotropy). This time it worked as expected and looks great. I must’ve miscopied something in my prior efforts. This fix appears to be verified for Windows 8.1, at least on my machine. Thanks for all the help!

Thanks so much! I’ve had this problem for a while now but I just thought it was an issue with my video drivers, so I never bothered to look online for a possible solution – until now! Now I can play just like I used to! Thanks so much again!! :D

I want to thank you very much for this fix.Because my amd card has got toasted, I was forced to play with integrated intel graphics. The fact that it screwed with AoE annoyed me the most and when I saw that there was a fix for it , I was relieved. I want to thank you again for this. Not too often I see this type of tutorials that actually work.

I have an Alienware 14 Windows 8 laptop, I entered everything from Geforce3.GFX file into every other .GFX file save the ones starting with 0 and it still failed-no water fix or FOW fix its also messed up my Editor, what now?

Thank you so much for this. Really worked. ive been playing this since i was ten and im half fifty now but still play once in a while and this tip has been terrific.

One question though. Now that ive done what you said, when i click on units and then command right click them on other objects, whether it is walls, buildings , trees or other units, IT FLASHES. like, they flash literally for a brief moment…. and i dont quite like it tbh. i wish it didnt flash. ive tried looking at the possible differences between the two codings (betwen geforce3 and i845) but still cant tell which one makes that difference. do you know anything of this matter?

I tried to do it the way recommended but I kept get “initialisation failed”. I then tried it the way some others have suggested (the delete and rename method) and that worked fine. Much obliged because I really like AOM, but haven’t been able to play it for a bit.

Thanks a bunch! Very surprised to say works great on ported AOM gold, OSX 10.9, Intel iris 5100.

The only issue that still remains: Even though the resolution options are all available in settings, choosing a widescreen res (1600×1200) doesnt seem to change anything. Still square screen with no res increase obvious.

Tried to start this up for nostalgia on my Win 8.1, this exact video glitch happened, and I was like ARE YOU KIDDIN.

But thankfully, I found this after I saw the official windows help page for this was useless. Thanks a lot, seriously. This also happens to be the first time I ever modified a game’s files besides some simple run of the mill modding…felt pretty epic XD.

this worked superb! but I realized another problem when I was done… the unit-description is incomplete now… I cannot see population-cost for units and not see the typical text “counter-archer, this unit is good against archers only” anymore… any Ideas?

Whenever I try to change anything I get a pop up saying the CD ROM is read-only but when I try to fix that in the properties tab, I always get the same pop up saying access denied…? Not sure what to do. (P.S. I’m the administrator so I don’t think that’s the problem)

Thank you very much, man!! You helped me a lot!!
Just even after I fixed this glitch, I still can’t see the “Ensemble Studios/Microsoft Studios” logo animation at the very beginning of the game, but… who cares! right?? XDD

Wow, thank you so much, I thought I had been condemned to the ugliest game ever, but you saved me. Being a total noob I had no idea about the method you used but the steps were easy to follow so thank you thank you thank you!!

Have only just come across to Linux Mint (17.3) from Windows 10 and while I’m glad to have made the swap, discovering ‘The Insurmountable List of Simple Things You Don’t Know’ (that old time Linux users take for granted) is just overwhelming.

Does anyone have the patience to explain where to find these files please?